Busted

So today didn't have a lot happen. We caught the subway out to Hero Square where we looked at the statues of lots of kings. Managed to span 1000 years of history with only 12 heroes, not all of which were kings. Which probably means that Hungary was a bit light on for heroes in it's first 1000 years of history. That or they didn't know what they looked like so they couldn't make statues of them.

After that we wandered around the city a little, looked at some ornate pools and a park and ended up at Gundels Restaurant. Which I am told is the best Restaurant in the whole of Hungary. There we ate one of the best meals I had in ages, all served by posh waiters in posh style. It was cool. I think my Grandfather may have to take out a mortgage to pay off the bill, but it was very nice and very posh.

Then we came home.

Tonight Jo and I were maybe going to go out with our friend Juli (who will be mentioned in the "Best of Budapest Vol. 2") to the baths. But I forgot to pack my swimmers. Who comes on a summer holiday and forgets their swimmers? I do.

So Jo and I wandered around a bit. Much to my embarrassment Jo took me into a shop that sold almost exclusively women's underwear. In the back there was a little rack with boardies, but none my shop. After that I refused to go into any shops till Jo checked them out first. I know it's juvenile, but I thought all the women might have thought I was enjoying myself in their underwear shops, and that would be bad.

Anyway, we heard that just two stops away on he subway there was a mall which sold men's swimwear. So we tossed up whether or not to go, considered the likelihood that we would actually end up going to the baths, and if it was worth the effort, and decided we had nothing to loose. So we bought ourselves our Metro tickets and headed for our train.

At the top of the escalators they have validators that you have to stick your ticket in to get stamped. But everyone was walking through so Jo didn't see them and I thought everyone must know better and be doing it at some later stage. So we just headed for the platform. When we arrived on the platform there were no more validators. We couldn't get our ticket stamped. But we thought, "Oh well, we won't get caught and if we will, we're tourists and we can tell them we were just confused. Because we have paid." So knowing we weren't stealing train rides we caught the train.

Lo and behold, we get of the train and as soon as we get to the escalators I get stopped out of about 10 people and get asked for my ticket. I pull it out and the man looks at it and says "Wait." He then books a girl for traveling without a ticket then turns back to us. He shows us our tickets (because, though Jo wasn't asked she handed in her unvalidated ticket too, how honest we Frenches are) and says "No good. No good." We tried to say we were confused, but he kept saying "No good. Must go in machine."

And so we got fined, 5000 HUF (that's AUS $31.50) for the two of us. And right at the point we were being fined I got a message from Juli saying that the baths are closed tonight. So in fact we didn't need to ever catch the train in the first place.

We went and had a coffee after that, then caught the train home again with properly validated tickets. The good news is that we now have two spare unused tickets for the Metro. So if you know of anyone in Budapest who wants some...